Dive Deep into Creativity: Discover, Share, Inspire
Most of us have heard of Facebook and indeed most of us probably have a Facebook account. Indeed, with roughly 2.89 billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2021, Facebook is the biggest social network worldwide.
There is no denying that Facebook provides a great platform to share information and for online social networking, but just how well does it work for businesses looking to advertise on the platform?
Firstly, although the user base on Facebook is huge, not everyone has a Facebook account, and even if they do, it doesn’t mean they use it much, if at all. The mistake a lot of businesses make is sticking strictly to Facebook to advertise - although this can often generate some business, it’s effectively ignoring all those that aren’t part of the platform and therefore missing out on lots of potential customers.
Facebook is also saturated with information, especially for those with lots of friends and who follow multiple groups. Of course there are those people who will spend hours scrolling through their Facebook wall to review all the latest posts, but for many people time is of the essence and they are most likely to limit their exposure to a brief period during a break at work or in any downtime in the evening. This means they will only see what has been posted recently or those posts that have received a lot of interaction. So unless a business posts regularly every day, it’s likely that their posts will only be seen by a select group of people.
And let’s not forget all those messages that simply never get read because (when not friends with someone) the message is sent through as a message request, which can often get missed as there’s no notification to indicate a message has been received. And for business pages, even though a Facebook business page is linked to a personal account, seeing messages requires a business to review their business page separately to see messages sent via their business page. With a busy schedule, this process can often be overlooked.
Finally, Facebook does not offer the same level of detail about a business as a website and therefore may not always provide enough of a hook to get a customer to engage. A good website design offers an opportunity for a professional online representation of a business, which a Facebook page often fails to achieve. Some people simply may not feel comfortable engaging with a business they know little about.
Our advice is to maximise the potential reach of a business online by using many different online resources, most especially a professional website design that is well optimised for search engines (SEO).